A group of researchers from the University of Michigan has released an Android app designed to defend against a common firewall vulnerability which they say commonly exposes smartphones on cellular networks.

There are plenty of ways to skin the server virtualization cat, and NextIO's means of doing so is to create a PCI-Express switch that links server nodes to each other and to Ethernet network, Fibre Channel SAN, and external peripherals such as flash drives or GPU coprocessors that are housed in an external chassis. Trying to convince data centers to converge their networks at the PCI-Express peripheral bus instead of in the Ethernet or Fibre Channel network takes a bit of work, and money. And that is why NextIO is happy to be getting $12.3m in Series F funding.

Samsung’s head honcho in China is reportedly worried that domestic spending on technology products in the People’s Republic is slowing down, fears which if realised could have a significant knock-on effect for the global economy.

No review is ever written in isolation, absent from context. Usually, you can guess the reviewer's bias within a few paragraphs, and compensate accordingly. He hates LCD display quality, she dislikes proprietary software, they yearn for the days of full bandwidth vinyl. You get the idea.

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History is just days away from being made as SpaceX' Dragon cargoship finally blasted off successfully on its Falcon 9 rocket this morning on its way to a rendezvous with the International Space Station.

EMC is mashing up operational data reporting from its products to build dashboards integrating customer spreadsheet and database information to provide charge back and resource usage in an IT-as-a-service scenario. This bridging between EMC operational data and customer data leads to the mashup's moniker: DataBridge.

Android App of the Week
As a long-time user of Catch Notes it was going to take something quite impressive to get me to jump ship to arch-rival Evernote but a recent update and integration with the latest versions of HTC's Sense have persuaded me to do so.

Vodafone is rolling in cash thanks to a healthy year in the US and stability in the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. However the telco is still only drawing 14.5 per cent of its £43bn service revenue from mobile data, despite the fact that it represents the majority of traffic carried.

HPC blog
With the introduction of VGX and the announcement of Nvidia's GeForce Grid offering, Nvidia and their partners are taking square aim at one of the biggest market opportunities around: gaming. Video games are big business.

Halo developer Bungie's lucrative ten-year deal with games publisher Activision has been made public, revealing the coder is set to receive an unprecedented bonus should its next title win critical acclaim.

Samsung has asked a Californian court to dismiss seven of Apple's expert witnesses in a patent case - and claimed their "slavish" love for the Foxconn-rebrander means they are unable to give useful testimony.

El Reg hasn't written about VIA for yonks, but it's one of the original x86 CPU makers, thanks to its purchase of processor design firm Centaur in 1999. VIA has long pitched low-cost, low-power CPUs, and now it's trying to do so again, this time with ARM technology, in a bid to take a bite out of Raspberry Pi.

The Orange Prize for Fiction, awarded annually to the best English-language novel from a female human author, will henceforth be known as the "Prize for Fiction" as Orange is taking its money elsewhere.

We are sure our readers have been enjoying NASA's footage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 launch to the ISS earlier today, but amid the excitement, you may have missed another historic moment for the US space programme. Listen carefully...

Techies at Microsoft Research, the big brain arm of the software goliath, have taken the crown in the sorting benchmark world. The researchers are thinking about how to implement new sorting algorithms in the Bing search engine to give Microsoft a leg up on the MapReduce algorithms that underpin Google's search engine and other big data-munching applications.

Hadoop, the distributed big-data processing system named after a toy elephant, now has a group of suppliers behind it. The tech giants are collectively aiming to develop the popular big data beast with a 1,000 node cluster – dubbed the Analytics Workbench – as a laboratory.

Slowing sales of notebook PCs, sluggish markets in Europe and Asia, and tepid buyers in the public sector all combined to shave Dell's revenues and give its net income a serious haircut in its first quarter of fiscal 2013.

The NSW government has awarded grants to seven mobile consortiums under the Collaborative Solutions program for Mobile Government. The government will provide around AUD$1 million to help the consortiums develop new mobile solutions for the public sector after a competitive pitch.